If you want 100 percent of the reward available to you, consider taking 100 percent of the responsibility available to you.

The amount you are able to receive in your life is directly correlated with your ability to take responsibility for yourself. Personal responsibility is different than taking on the burdens of others, and it does include completely and wholely owning how you show up in your relationships, communities, and organizations.

You get to say how you show up, what you show up for, and what you show up with. Everyone else gets to say for them, and you get to say for you.

What if you remembered your reward lived in your own choice?

Change is easy if you can learn to focus.

You are designed to transform. The energy of focus is the latent heat that changes you without effort.

If you focus on what you want to change and truly focus, the change is inevitable.

One of the most powerful decisions you can make is for “it” to go well. Whatever “it” is.

When you entertain the thought that it might not go well, you let doubt contaminate your power. Your personal power is your ability to respond with love, clarity, creativity, and wisdom. You do not need to be able to control the uncontrollable aspects of the endeavor for you to be successful.

Your job is to do your best. You can only give your best when you know you have the choice to give your best no matter what happens. Your best includes appropriate preparation, presence, and commitment to excellence, yet it doesn’t involve letting the voice of doubt steal the show.

What if you decided that it will go great because you are great?

A closed loop allows energy to keep flowing into its next cycle.

Procrastinating, resisting, avoiding, or holding back will always cause the experience of brokenness, not wholeness.

Where do you need to close a loop, no matter what it takes, so that you can keep flowing?

If you want folks to play along, be playful.

No one naturally responds happily to shame, blame, or right versus wrong. If you’re really up to a big game in life, be sure to make it a game.

Where could you bring in some more play to accomplish more of what’s important?

Choosing not to trust yourself to deliver is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trust is a form of self-love that unlocks your presence, forgiveness, creativity, and fun. It does not guarantee that you will produce the exact outcomes you hope for, yet it does guarantee that you will be able to learn and enjoy the process, which is the point of being a life.

Without self-trust, you will rely on less-than-optimal sources for guidance, like the past or gaining the approval of others. This is never fulfilling and will always leave you feeling like you failed in the long term, even if you achieve “success.”

Trust has nothing to do with the outcome, yet it does help us have more clarity and wisdom on the journey, which will likely improve the outcome if you are optimizing for a happy life.

Where could you trust yourself as a means to release yourself from the burden of life into the blessing of life?

I am a big fan of never doing anything you don’t want to do unless it will help you with something you do want. In this context, you will, of course, do many things you don’t want to do in the moment.

A similar context to make choices within when your mind is resisting something you sense is wise to do is to remember what blessing in your life the task at hand is connected to. Then, maybe you can allow the opportunity in front of you to be a blessing rather than a curse.

What might you achieve more easily if you stayed connected to your blessings and what you want?

On the days I feel in a lower mood or am not at my physical best, I always declare them a day for “even more of the good stuff.” This means I listen to more music, prioritize more sunshine, and make extra time for the other things that I know are supportive, like moving my body or getting some rest.

I work to deploy the same practice when I know I am going to engage with something that tends to stress me out or pull me into being a version of myself I don’t enjoy, like working at screens for an extended time, trying to get my kids to be in the car and at school on time, or having a conversation that feels uncomfortable. I acknowledge ahead of time that it is something that can pull me out of being loving, and I work to bring extra presence and love to the task at hand and remain as connected to my best self as possible for myself and others.

My mind often wants me give myself less of the good stuff on a tougher day, or to be less loving during a stressful moment. Yet I know that this reaction only exacerbates the situation.

Would would it look like to give yourself, someone else, or the task at hand a some extra love instead of less?

There’s always another level, but it’s in another place.

Your next level of love, wisdom, joy, fulfillment, or any other kind of growth or expansion is in the unknown, which means you’ll need to be willing to feel all sorts of uncomfortable things on the way there.

Leaping into the unknown might feel scary, but it’s actually where all the better stuff is waiting for you.

Where is it time for you to go somewhere new so you can have something new?

Being aware of the reasons why something might not work can be helpful so you can include them in your solution. However, focusing mainly on why something won’t work will ensure that it doesn’t happen.

Focusing on the possibilities and inviting other people into those possibilities through who you are being is how to create the bridge from where you are to where you want to go.

If you look to your current impasse, are you being a wall or are you being a bridge?

If you are willing to let go.

The energy of creativity and possibility is always right there, waiting to support you if you are willing to let go of fear.

What if you focused on what wants to be created rather than what you are scared of?

In this moment, you are collaborating with an energy that gives you your power. The energy is either loving and helpful or mean and undermining. The energy you partner with dictates the quality of life you experience, the actions you take, and the impact you have on the people and world you touch.

The frequency you choose to align with and embody is your foundational partnership. It uplifts or weighs down any other interaction, relationship, or possibility. Understanding and becoming responsible for what you are allowing to create your life is vital if you want to experience and give love and support. We will all end up partnering with the wrong thing at some point, and we can make a change or an upgrade at any moment.

What would you like to partner with right now and today?

Part of becoming excellent at something is making mistakes. Making mistakes does not make you a fraud.

What makes you a professional is how you respond to mistakes. Frauds pretend to be something they aren’t or have something they don’t have. If you find joy in the process and are transparent about where you are and what you are doing, you can trust yourself, and others will, too.

Perfection is not the goal; growth and transparency in pursuing excellence are.

What if you could trust your failures instead of resisting them?

The things your mind craves are waiting in the place you don’t want to go.

Remember, the answers and blessings you seek are not in the familiar but in the mystery and uncertainty of the unknown. They are the rewards that await on the other side of the doorway that your fear or obstacle is presenting to you.

What if you trusted that your solutions and gifts were waiting for you in the unknown?

You do not need to fear failure.

You do not need to fear frustration.

You do not even need to fear fear.

Success is a choice and a lifestyle, not a destination to earn or prove your way to. As you unendingly evolve and expand, failure, frustration, and fear will be part of your success, not the barrier to it. Each time you are moving through an upgrade, you will experience the three F’s. Your work is to remember success is already inherently yours because of who you are at your essence. The only way you can truly fail is by forgetting this.

True success is remembering that life is a gift. What might happen if you stopped making it a burden?

It can be challenging to be the newest version of yourself around the people who “know” you best. However, this is where the work is.

As you and others fall into old patterns, games, and roles, the first step in finding freedom is to choose love and compassion for everyone, including yourself. Forgiveness is the only thing that can neutralize a situation so something new can emerge. From a chosen fresh start, you can make tiny changes, which are actually the big changes.

Remember, the work you are doing on yourself is only working if it is making you more compassionate, loving, and forgiving. These are the states that unlock your creativity and power.

Where can you have some compassion to allow yourself to evolve?

Deciding is different than having it all figured out. We think we can wait until the latter happens, and then we can do the former, yet this is untrue.

We can only have it “all figured out” mentally in retrospect. The power of deciding lives in the uncertainty we think we need to relieve ourselves from. If we already had it all perfectly planned and guaranteed, we wouldn’t even need to decide; we would just flow effortlessly down the path.

Once we embrace the mystery ahead of us and truly decide, we receive the commitment and creativity we need to be able to expand and navigate the unknown.

What if you didn’t need to wait to have it all figured out to decide?

Courage is not something you need to try really hard to muster. It is not something you need to “work on” getting more of or wait around to earn. Courage is a loving force already within you that you can rest in.

You were born with courage inside of you, yet it’s not designed to make fear go away. It is designed to protect you as you move into action, as your fear of the unknown will subside once you begin.

You don’t need to try so hard or wait for fear to disappear. Instead, imagine courage as a loving embrace waiting to guide you toward the new experiences you deserve.

What if you could rest in the courage already within you?

There is no “right” path that will lead you to a destination with no problems. There is no secret to uncover that will help your mind know for sure that you are doing the very thing you “should” be doing to guarantee your preferences will come to fruition.

In this moment and any moment, there are infinite possibilities available to us that could lead us in a life-giving direction. Our job is to lean into the wisdom of our bodies rather than the fear of our thinking minds to help us discern the quality of the action we want to take. There is no right path, and there is a difference between a path that feels truthful to us and one that does not.

When we embrace the fact that we can’t guarantee anything in the future, we experience present-moment freedom, which is helpful because all we have is the present moment.

What if you took your attention off getting it “right” and put it on acting from the truth?

We are designed to become fulfilled through creating, not controlling.

This is because we can’t control the future. We can influence it a bit with what we create in the moment, yet we are not given jurisdiction over the outcomes of what we create.

The truth that we cannot control the future is not meant to make us apathetic or resigned. Instead, it is meant to liberate us to be present and learn to be guided by our own wisdom in the moment.

Where have you been stressing about an outcome instead of focusing on your creative contribution?